Optical fibers are presently widely used for communicating information. In the physical installation of optical fibers in e.g. networks such as in large telecommunication systems, in computers, LANs, optical fibers have to spliced to each other and connected to various physical device such as lasers, light detectors, couplers, etc. Also in maintenance of existing optical fiber installations there is a need for repairing optical fibers, this also requiring that optical fibers are spliced to each other. Optical fibers composed to ribbon fibers are more and more used since ribbon fibers hold a plurality of optical fibers and are more easily handled than individual fibers. When making splices or connections to devices the primary protection coating of the optical fibers has to be removed in order to expose the bare optical fiber, this operation being called to strip the optical fibers. The primary protection coating is commonly made of an artificial resin such as acrylic plastics. The stripping operation mostly leaves some dust or particles on the bare portion of the optical fibers and this dust must be removed. Finally the optical fibers are cut off a right angles and then the splicing or connection operation is performed. In the cutting and splicing operations the bare fiber ends are positioned very accurately in relation to another fibers or an input or output surface area of a device. For this positioning often some kind of positioning planes or surfaces are used, such as V-grooves. For such positioning to be accurate the bare fiber ends should be extremely clean, since also a very small dust particle can jeopardize the required accuracy.
Dust and particles can adhere rather strongly to stripped, bare fiber ends and it may be difficult to have them completely removed. The removal of dust and particles of stripped fiber ends has often, in a simple way, been executed by moistening a cloth with some alcohol and then wiping the ends. However, such a wiping procedure is not quite satisfactory since the cloth can itself leave some particles. In addition, in some applications, e.g. High Strength Splicing, the bare fibers should not touched by any rough objects or materials.